I have emerged a few packages but have a problem compiling the glibc, that pointed me to a compiler problem. So I tried to emerge the gcc first.
"emerge gcc". It runs for while but somewhere bails out with

Okay, let's see what's really going on, then. Look in "/var/tmp/portage/sys-devel/gcc-4.1.2/work/build/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu" and find the "config.log" file and see what the exact failure is. Towards the end of the config.log will be output relevant to the failure.